The data management technologies such as master data management (MDM) and customer data platform (CDP) are crucial for better handling of customer data. Customer data platform is defined as a marketer-based management system which helps in creating a unified customer database. The management system helps users to extract relevant data from multiple sources. The data can be structured to create a single customer profile. The structured data is then made available to other marketing systems to enable seamless and personalized marketing.

Most businesses use master data management to manage the critical data available in the organization. This critical data includes reference and analytical data that helps in making business decisions. Several MDM systems lack the necessary information about omnichannel interactions, historical transactions and fail to provide insights into customer relationships. Also, most packaged CDPs that enterprises use struggle to provide advanced profiling, data-matching, stewardship, merging, and governance capabilities.

Steps involved in managing enterprise customer data:

1.  Build Reliable Customer Profiles

A comprehensive customer data management system should have the capability to aggregate all the important information about internal and external customers under one umbrella and make it easily available to them. In addition to this, the data platform must also have the capability to create profiles with correlated interactions and transactions, and the customer information must be organized and cleaned from time to time.

2. Uncover Relationships and Hierarchies

Uncovering relationships between products, consumers, organizations, stores, channels, and transactions are paramount for enterprises when it comes to managing customer data. Enterprises can rely on graph technology to understand such relationships between entities and have a deeper understanding of their customers.

3. Infuse Analytics and Recommendations

If enterprises blend data into one place, support teams will be empowered to get visibility into customer behaviors, product interests, preferences, and channel choice with much ease. Understanding customers’ needs will be simpler and they will be able to provide personalized experiences based on the complete information too.

4. Collaborative Curation of Data

Multi-customer focus can help enterprises to collaborate for ongoing data stewardship. If the platform used by them provides built-in annotating, tagging and voting features, then every team member can contribute and continuously improve enterprise knowledge.

5. Enterprises must work toward Ensuring Compliance

The customer data management platform used by an enterprise should support compliance. It should be also supportive of regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).